Company history

The company was assembled, not founded. In 1937 four firms — Nihon Shokuryo Kogyo, the Fuji Paint works of Kokusan Kogyo, Velvet Soap and Godo Yushi — were merged under the Nissan zaibatsu into the original Nippon Oils and Fats Co., Ltd. The oldest strand ran back to Standard Yushi, established in 1921, which had started Japan’s hardened-oil industry and been renamed Godo Yushi in 1931; its plant became the Oji works and the nucleus of the merged company.

What the merger created was a general chemical maker running oils, soap and paint as one business. Wartime consolidation widened it further: by 1943 it had absorbed several companies including Teikoku Explosives, and had added the Mikuni paint works and the Shinmei welding-rod works. Explosives, paint and welding thus entered the company not by strategy but by acquisition — four technically unrelated trades under a single roof, a shape that would define the next sixty years.

In 1945 the company took over the chemicals operations of Nippon Mining and renamed itself Nissan Chemical Industries. Then came defeat, the dissolution of the zaibatsu, and the Enterprise Reconstruction and Reorganization Act — and with them the question of where to cut the company apart.

In July 1949 fertilizer stayed with the surviving company and four businesses — oils, paint, explosives and welding rods — were transferred together to a newly separated “second company”, which took back the old name Nippon Oils and Fats. It listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange that September with roughly 3,000 employees and leading positions in each of its trades: 32% of the domestic oils market (first), 10% of paint (second), 31% of explosives (second). It began post-war life carrying a diversified portfolio it had not chosen.

The weakness showed within a decade. Oils, some 60% of sales, sold raw material into the soap trade while rivals advertised and won on finished goods, and the company was dragged into price competition it could not escape. It posted losses for three consecutive half-year terms — $458,333 (¥165m) in the term to November 1956, then again to May and November 1957 — while sales stalled between ¥5.1bn and ¥5.6bn. Rebuilding fell to president Ohashi Taiji.

The answer was to move upstream of the raw material itself. In 1961 the company entered petrochemicals with a new Chidori works in Kawasaki, buying petroleum feedstock from Nisseki Chemical nearby and shifting from natural glycerine to the synthetic kind. Earnings had already turned positive in 1958 and peaked in the term to November 1961 at $975,000 (¥351m) — then thinned again to $86,111 (¥31m) by 1965. Modernization ran in parallel: the Bibai works in Hokkaido (1954), explosive metal forming, a lubricant-additive joint venture with Lubrizol of the United States (1964), and the large Totsuka paint works in Yokohama the same year. By the late 1960s six self-accounting divisions — oleochemicals, edible oils, household products, paint, explosives and welding — ran side by side, and the thin margins of an oils-led business persisted.

Growth in the 1970s came from partnership. A 1973 joint venture with Diamond Shamrock of the United States brought zinc-flake anti-corrosion technology and a supply business to the big automakers; it became NOF Metal Coatings and, by 2010, held roughly 66% of the world market. In 1977 the company joined Showa Denko’s new Oita complex with a plant making polybutene for cable insulation, and in 1970 it had absorbed Teikoku Explosives Manufacturing to consolidate its explosives base. Oils, explosives, rust prevention and chemicals now each earned their keep.

The overseas frame followed: Metal Coatings International in the United States (1984), NOF America (1988), NOF Europe in Belgium (1994). At home the Kawagoe works was spun out as NOF Giken in 1980 and the Tsukuba research laboratory opened in 1983. Thirty years after the re-founding the operating base was complete — but so was the problem. The company was broad, and in no single market was its investment large enough to lead.

The resolution began in the laboratory. Research into anti-reflective film started in 1992 and reached volume production at the Taketoyo works in Aichi in 1998, eventually running four lines. In 1999 the company bought 95% of Nippon Koki, making its explosives core a subsidiary, and renamed its new-business unit the Life Science Division — signalling in the organization chart where the next decade’s money would go.

The exits came fast. In March 2000 the welding business was sold to Taseto and the Shinmei works closed; that September the paint business was transferred to Nippon Oil and Fats BASF Coatings. The residual holdings went too — Taseto shares to Shinko Taseto in 2004, the coatings joint venture to BASF in 2005. Two of the four trades inherited in 1949 were gone within five years.

What replaced them was chosen, not inherited. A drug delivery systems unit was created in 2001 to sell materials into pharmaceuticals; the DDS plant inside the Kawasaki works started up in 2005, moving the business from laboratory to commercial production. Anti-reflective film found its market in plasma displays, peaking in the year to March 2003.

In October 2007 Nippon Oils and Fats became NOF Corporation — a name shed of the merger history that had defined it, and of the oils that had once been 60% of sales. The same month a functional-films division was created and the DDS unit promoted to full division status. Consolidation followed: NOF Giken became a wholly owned subsidiary in 2010, and sales and production bases were added in China (2011) and Germany (2014).

The organization was pulled together to match. Display materials were folded into the chemicals division in 2020; in April 2023 oleochemicals and chemicals merged into a Functional Materials Division, and the life-science and DDS units merged into a single Life Science Division, putting research and commercialization in medicine under one roof. The timing was fortunate: NOF’s lipids for the lipid nanoparticles used in COVID-19 vaccines had made it globally visible around 2021, and the merged division met that demand as one business.

The explosives line, meanwhile, found a new context. NOF holds Japan’s leading position in solid rocket propellants, and in April 2024 Hokkaido NOF was absorbed into Nippon Koki to concentrate the organization. Smaller than functional materials in scale, the business now carries weight in both margin and strategic significance as Japan debates domestic defence and space capability — the explosives trade acquired in the 1943 wartime mergers, still running.

After moving to the TSE Prime Market in 2022, the company posted records across the board in the year to March 2025: sales of $1.6B (¥238bn), operating profit of ¥45.3bn and net profit of ¥36.5bn, with ROE at 13.4%, above the mid-term plan target. President Sawamura Koji has set sustained ROE above 13% under the NOF Vision 2030 plan. Eighty-odd years read as one continuous rearrangement of the portfolio the 1937 merger handed over.